


A Steve Rogers Story

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Romance, Steve Rogers-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 12:24:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12108657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The past, present, and future of the man behind the shield, told through the filter of some contemporary movements in art.





	1. Expressionism

Steven Grant Rogers is born prematurely in July of 1918; he is a runty scrapper from the start. He weighs only two pounds, five ounces and during the delivery, the midwife is alarmed by the blue tint of his skin. He does not remember this, not even later when Erskine's serum sharpens his sensory perception and hones his memory to picture-perfect accuracy. He does not remember that his father, Joseph, is not present for his arrival, consumed as he is with seeking the end of his misery at the bottom of a bottle. He does not remember how weak his mother, Sarah, is on that day, although he remembers her physical weakness in the years that follow.

Steve survives his first few weeks in an incubator but he goes untouched by his frail mother, unseen by his truant father, and frowned upon by the hospital staff who cannot understand how this mewling changeling has not given up.

He is released from the hospital eventually, his mother swaddling his tiny body in her old wool scarves despite the late-July heat wave. She thinks Steve is the most beautiful baby she has ever seen, and later, during low moments when Steve is being tortured by his peers, she will tell him this. She carries him home to their apartment in Williamsburg, where their kindly Jewish neighbors have saved some of their noodle kugel for Sarah, and gift her with several cans of tinned milk. She cries at the gesture. Steve will not remember this.

He will remember the exhaustion lining her face as she sits by the stove in their tiny, one-room tenement. He will remember how her faded house dress hangs limply from her ever-shrinking frame, how her shoulders sag and her spine pushes against her thin skin as each winter's round of pneumonia leaves her weaker than the last. He will remember their mattresses drawn close to that stove, taking turns tending the precious embers throughout the long evenings. He will remember his early hatred of the cold, which he will never lose.

Steve does moderately well in kindergarten, and later, at primary school. He is never the top student, due to his frequent illness-induced absences, but he tries his best and behaves well when he is able to attend. His teachers tell Sarah that he is a perfect angel, and she smiles wanly in response. “If only report cards paid the bills,” she gripes to him after each meeting, as they leave the school hand in hand. Later, Steve will not begrudge her this bitterness. Later, Steve will understand the slow atrophying of sentiment that comes with years of loneliness.

When he is ten years old, his mother shows up at school on a Wednesday. He is called to Principal Saltzman's office and she is there waiting, thin-lipped with red-rimmed eyes. She does not cry when she tells him his father has been found dead behind a bar in Manhattan. Steve will remember her eyes, how flat and dull they are, for the rest of his life. She takes him home, but there is nothing for him to do as the burial is arranged for the next day. He feels no great emotion at the man's passing; they have only had a handful of awkward meetings. He is enjoying a rare streak of good health, so he goes outside to find James Buchanan Barnes, who he knows is wandering the streets because Steve has not seen him in the schoolyard this morning. Bucky often does this; though he comes from a nice family, even at their tender age he dislikes the rule and order of school. Neither boy knows yet how regiment and discipline will come to define their lives.

He finds Bucky where he often is, down by the Navy yard. He tells his only friend what has happened and Bucky says nothing, simply slings a long arm around Steve's slight shoulders and procures a bag of peanuts from his pea-coat, shoving it towards him. Steve will never forget how the salty taste mingles with the smell of diesel in the air, the clanging of steel as the USS Pensacola comes together before their young eyes.

Steve attends a public high school in Manhattan with Bucky, and his mother makes ends meet by taking in sewing from the neighborhood and keeping house for a wealthy family who lives nearby. He excels academically. They never discuss Steve's father, or how badly she is ailing. She does not complain when Steve's asthmatic coughing keeps her up at night, and Steve does not mention the blood-splattered handkerchiefs he has begun finding mixed in with the laundry.

She pushes on until his graduation, and if Steve has the secret worry that she is merely waiting until she can pass without fear for his future, he does not mention this either. There is love in their small family, and Bucky often joins them for supper. He never shows up without a loaf of bread or a roll of salami and Sarah never allows him to leave without fixing some imagined hole in his trousers or jacket. Steve is five feet, four inches, weighs a hundred pounds soaking wet with rocks in his pockets, something the boys at school never let him forget. Bucky helps him out of scraps often and Steve is mostly grateful for his best friend's help, although occasionally he feels a pang of indignation at how poorly the body he has been given matches his fighting spirit. This is not something he holds against Bucky nor his mother, however, and Steve promises himself that he will find a way to beat all the bullies, to be brave, regardless of the hand he has been dealt.

Steve is alarmed when he arrives home, one afternoon in June, to find Sarah is not there on a day when normally she should be. His fear mingles with grief, the room swings sideways as he sits down on his bed. He breathes with difficulty for some time, speculating, then he forces himself back up, and walks to the Brooklyn Hospital Center, about a half a mile away. He knows, empirically, that the streets are not actually colorless nor are there tumultuous storms on that day, only a week after he has graduated from George Washington High. And yet... this is how Steve will remember the afternoon. Violent, raging winds carelessly tossing him around a monochrome world. He will remember how unseen, insignificant he feels as he makes his way up the stairs of the hospital, as he asks for his mother, as he is directed to the isolated tuberculosis ward.

He will remember the sickly pea-green of the walls when he finds her, resting on a small cot towards the far end of the room. He will remember how the harsh, grating coughs of the dozens of other patients makes it hard for him to hear her. He will remember how weakly her hands grasp his, how thin her voice is as she commands him to live honestly, and to make her proud. He will remember the feeling of helplessness as he rests his heavy head on the pillow next to hers, as he prays for her to live. He will remember how two days later when he arrives early in the afternoon with a small, hand-picked bouquet of yellow dandelions, a doctor pulls him aside and informs him somberly that she is gone. He will remember the mustache of that doctor. He will remember the bee-sting on his left wrist he'd gotten in the abandoned lot by his old school while foraging for his offering. He will remember, after the funeral, the warmth of Bucky's strong hand bleeding through the shoulder of his Sunday best and the offer of sanctuary, companionship. 

He will remember, in those dark and lonesome months that follow, the forging of his ironclad resolve to live honestly and make Sarah proud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a nerd who got way too into learning about depression-era Brooklyn while writing this, so here are some links if you're interested: [some fun Brooklyn history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamsburg,_Brooklyn#Incorporation_into_New_York_City), [Jewish American foods](http://www.foodbycountry.com/Spain-to-Zimbabwe-Cumulative-Index/United-States-Jewish-Americans.html), [a list of ships built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard](http://www.columbia.edu/~jrs9/BNY-Ships.html%20%20%20Ships%20Constructed%20at%20the%20Brooklyn%20Navy%20Yard), and [an article about tenements with some helpful pictures as a reference point](https://www.6sqft.com/new-yorks-dirty-little-secret-the-apartment-kitchen/). Confession, though: the treatment of TB may not be entirely accurate here, but considering the theme of this chapter is more about emotion than fact anyway, maybe Steve is just mis-remembering.


	2. Cubism

Clumsy. Big feet, powerful hands. The ground is too far away and in the first few days after his body has been altered, he breaks more door handles than he can count. He's too tall for the racks at Camp Lehigh. His hair skims the tops of its doorways. He looks in the mirror and thinks, my head is bigger. Everything else is too but it's his head he wonders about the longest. Is his brain bigger? Does that explain why everything is so damn loud and bright and stinks so intensely now?

A shield, a uniform. Pretend, ersatz. Rayon and painted wood. He thinks about Bucky often, while he's up on some local theater's stage punching a fake Hitler. Bucky, who is seeing true horrors. Bucky, who has not written in months, who had been teaching him to box before he'd joined the fight. He preens and marches for the crowd, he sells them the dream they're trying so desperately to buy. The Star Spangled Man with a Plan. Colonel Phillip's words, "You are not enough." He hustles as best he can, doesn't think too hard about which dream he believes in anymore.

He laughs the first time Senator Brandt shows him the costume. Fiddles with the ridiculous nubby wings on the balaclava, checks the man's face to see if he is being fooled. The man is calm, smug, pleased with the preposterous aesthetic. Steve swallows down the old feelings of being unseen; all he does now is present himself to be seen. He watches himself on the silver screen and at first he cannot recognize the man in his uniform. Is that his body? Did he film that, or did they have some hulking, musclebound giant stand in for him on that day? But the mask comes off in another scene and it is undeniably him. He is handsome, conventionally so. He realizes this with astonishment. He feels the heat rise up his neck when the audience applauds. He is proud, and he is a little ashamed of his pride. He is embarrassed by all of this, and he wishes he was not.

There is something else new that presents itself in his life: sex. For the first time in his life, he sees himself reflected in the sparkling, interested eyes of a beautiful woman.

It's a dancer from the chorus line who first approaches him after a show in Milwaukee. She takes him back to her hotel room and as he undresses, attempts to kiss her without any grace or ease, she simpers girlishly at his physique. He's bigger than other men, in every way that counts, she tells him with a wink. But he doesn't know what to do with his hands or his hips, and their coupling is stilted, unsatisfying. Her dark, shining hair is curled into victory rolls and her voluptuous form reminds him of another, a woman in whose eyes he could see himself reflected even before he was desirable. Peggy. He closes his own eyes when he comes, bites his lip to keep from saying any name, tucks his face into the girl's rose-scented hair.

Things go more smoothly with a doe-eyed blonde from Philadelphia. The cut of her faded red dress is modest but flatters her beautiful figure. Her room in the boarding house is on the third floor and she has to sneak him in under cover of darkness. They bump around in the unlit hallway; he laughs boyishly, feeling half-drunk from the intrigue. A stubbed toe. This is not him. Is it? Is he a boyish man? Later, she runs her hand over his broad chest, tracing along the muscles of his side down to his trim waist. She tells him she is an art student, and that she admires the sharp lines of his form.

He wants to admit his love for sketching to her then, but remembers that this girl does not know him; has not brought him home to be Steve for her. What she sees is a projection of the role they have given him flashing before her eyes at 24 frames per second. Steve is unconvinced, even as she clutches at his shoulder and moans softly in his ear while he moves inside of her, that she recognizes who he is. A fractured reflection of the stage and the reel and the page is what she sees, and all that she desires. Bucky would still see him, he thinks later, but Bucky is not here.


	3. Surrealism

A glowing blue box in the corner of the parasit bathes the cockpit in an eerie light and when Steve tries to raise his hands, they are deeply wrinkled. It is not age, his skin is not liver spotted and when he reaches up to run his fingers through his hair, it is as thick as the day... what day? He wonders. He pushes the thought aside and makes to unbuckle himself from the pilot's seat where he's resting, but there is no buckle. He rubs the tips of his fingers together and realizes they are wet. He rises and turns, and he is looking at his mother. She is faced away from him, she leans against the high back of a wooden chair as her shoulders convulse and a sharp, whooping cough is torn from her throat. He goes to her, and he is so much taller than her now. He cannot remember being taller than her, not ever in his whole life.

He turns her gently and she looks up at him with adoration. There is a speck of blood at the corner of her mouth, he picks up a handkerchief lying on the chair and wipes it away. “Steve...” she sighs, leaning into his broad chest. He holds her as she is racked with another coughing fit. When he hears a groaning, creaking noise he turns his head back to the window of their tenement to see a torrent of freezing, black water is rushing in through the sole window. Sarah looks at him in dismay and he picks her up in both arms, rushing for the door.

It is then that Steve realizes there is no door. He spins around in frenzied horror, the surging tide already at his knees.

The water reaches their necks quickly and his mother lays her head against his shoulder, humming the old Captain America tune the USO girls used to sing. He will not let himself despair as the water reaches his chin, his mouth, his nose. He tries to hold her body above his head so that she can continue breathing once he has been fully submerged but soon there is no escape. There is only the icy water.

He blinks, and realizes he has not drowned yet. His mother is not here with him. He looks around but it is very dark. He thinks he can see the outline of shattered glass windows in front of him. He is being held to a chair, and when he tries to break from his restraints he finds his limbs are weak. Not weak, his brain registers, not restrained... freezing. All at once the sensation of cold clamps down on him and he remembers that he does not know the last time he breathed in air, he is still not breathing now. He attempts to scream, and comprehends then that the water is all around him, inside his mouth, in his lungs, everywhere. He screams anyway, because the agony is unending and even howling noiselessly, fruitlessly, is a kind of relief. Eventually it all goes blissfully dark and silent.

He wakes, and Bucky has his feet kicked up on the vanity of his backstage dressing room. His face is smudged with the muck and blood of recent combat, and clods of mud tumble from the bottom of his boots. Looking closer, Steve sees that his old costume is under Bucky's feet, and Bucky shifts a little in his chair, moving his feet along the nylon fabric and grinding the dirt into its surface.

“Sorry about that Stevie, didn't mean to ruin all your fun,” Bucky says, grinning impishly.

“You're alive,” Steve breathes in response, reveling in the sight of him.

“Yes and no,” Bucky answers, “Partly yes. Partly no. Lotta big things happening out there Stevie, don't you think it's a little silly locking yourself away like this?”

Steve shakes his head, even as Bucky is speaking his voice is growing fainter. “I don't understand,” he groans in frustration. “I can't understand anything anymore.”

“You always did have a weird brain, pal. And now you're trapped down here with it for God knows how long. You think much time has passed yet? An hour? A month? Coupl'a years, maybe?”

Steve tries to walk towards him but when he looks down at his legs, they are spindly and weak. His feet are completely encased in two blocks of ice. He looks up and Bucky winks at him, hopping up and walking over to him before leaning down to whisper in his ear, “Looks like you're just not enough, Rogers. Better start dancing.” With that he moves past him and when Steve turns his head to follow Bucky, he's nowhere to be seen. He's alone in the dressing room, and the ice is creeping up his legs, swallowing his sickly form. It reaches his hands and he is truly trapped, immobile, it reaches his chest and he finds he is unable to draw breath, it reaches his eyes and he must choose whether to die with his eyes open or closed.

Steves leaves his eyes open.

The ice surrounds him and hardens, thickens. He is subsumed by it. He wonders who he was before he was this block of ice. He thinks he remembers faintly a time when he was warm, but he cannot be sure. His world grows dark as the ice continues expanding, growing denser, pushing in on his body until it feels like he will be crushed. His awareness dims, flickers, and goes out.

He wakes again soon enough, and tries to scream only to find he is trapped in the dark depths of the sea. But the water around him is changing, hardening, shifting. He is dying, but that cannot be because he is also blinking and flailing desperately. It comes back to him, for a second. He took the HYDRA ship down in the Arctic, it was going to kill so many people. He groans, and wishes he could weep and rend his hair in self-pity.

From the deep and murky waters, Peggy emerges, swimming. She has a mermaid's tail and he is mesmerized by the shimmering, opalescent scales. He has a stray urge to draw her, bare breasts swaying in the water as she propels herself towards him. She leans in and kisses him chastely but with passion, and his lips tingle at the sensation. “I'll show you how, just be there,” her ghostly voice echoes in his mind, and he closes his eyes in bliss. When he opens them again she is gone, and he knows now with terrible certainty that the tingling is not Peggy. Has never been Peggy. 

All at once the sensation of cold clamps down on him and he remembers that he does not know the last time he breathed in air, he is still not breathing now. He attempts to scream, and comprehends then that the water is all around him, inside his mouth, in his lungs, everywhere. He screams anyway, because the agony is unending and even howling noiselessly, fruitlessly, is a kind of relief. Eventually it all goes blissfully dark and silent.

He wakes some time later...


	4. Minimalism

Steve lays on the single bed of his Bedstuy apartment. He is fully dressed. He is awake, and he is staring at the ceiling. Orange light filters in from the street lamps outside, but the place is otherwise dark. His hand runs down the front of the cotton t-shirt he is wearing, feels the sweat dampening it. The apartment is sweltering but the fan in the corner is left off. He has avoided looking at the air conditioner since moving in.

He rises and wipes his brow. He walks to the door, grabbing the duffel bag full of boxing gear that lays beside it from where he left it early this morning.

The streets are mostly empty this late at night. He does not recognize the make or model of a single car parked alongside the curb. A day's worth of trapped heat still rises up from the pavement. He walks slowly towards the old-fashioned boxing gym. He has a key to the place, he's sorted out an agreement with the owner, who is a fan. Steve has played on this iconic, tragic heroism once or twice. Mostly to get help with all the strange new technology around him. He never lets any conversation last longer than five minutes. He never moves close enough to anyone to suggest that he might touch them, or invite them to touch him.

He reaches the gym, unlocking the back door and dropping his bag by the ring. He retrieves old punching bags from a closet in the back, dragging them across the floor. When he is finished he surveys his work; they lay neatly arranged in a line, patiently awaiting his wrath.

He wraps his hands and begins; the memories do as well. This is the only time Steve remembers or feels. He is lost for a while in the rhythm of measured aggression. He hears the back door open and close, tracks the footfall of the person walking down the hallway towards him. Hell-toe step, precise, heavy landing. A man. Tall. Military. He does not stop punching the bag until it has flown off the chain, landing across the room, decimated like the others. He hangs up another, and begins again.

When he hears Fury's voice he stops. Listens. Responds, when necessary. This man is not his friend, and he is not grateful for this interruption. But he will accept this mission to find the tesseract. He has nothing else.


	5. Pop Art

The world is so much more brighter than he remembers it being before the war. He thinks at first it is simply his improved senses but he remembers how he perceived things while on tour, in battle, and he swears there is more color now. He's hesitant at first to ask anyone but after a few months of working with Natasha, he feels they've built up a kind of rapport.

“Natasha, can I ask you a question?” A good start, he thinks. Very neutral.

She looks at him cagily, always assessing, always weighing her options. Finally she says simply, “Sure, Steve.”

“Is the world, uh... are there more colors now?” As soon as it's out of his mouth he wants it back, realizing immediately how private the observation is and how silly it sounds when spoken out loud. Too late.

She smiles ruefully, and picks up the tablet from the conference room table between them. She types quietly for a moment, then sets the device down and pushes it across the surface to him. She's left a browser window open to the Wikipedia page on “Color Theory” and Steve peruses the article for a few moments before looking up at her, one eyebrow arched. “So... yes?”

“How about you ask that cute agent down in R&D who's been flirting shamelessly with you to go look at some modern art, and figure it out?”

Steve doesn't do this. But he does visit the MoMA the next time he passes through New York on his way to visit Tony at the Avengers facility. He is shocked by what art has become, what revolutions he has missed while under the ice. A Campbell's Soup can as art? A urinal as art? Comic books as art? While passing through the sterile white halls of the museum, Steve wonders if anyone bothered to save any issues of his old comics for him, and what sort of price they'd catch if he inscribes his name on the cover. He doesn't think he'd ever sell a thing from his past, but the universality of art as commerce these days makes him curious.

He has started a list from the suggestions people give him. He keeps it in good faith, and eventually he gets to everything that his colleagues and acquaintances recommend. He still has the feeling that entire conversations are happening somewhere in the air over his head, beyond what his frame of reference can detect. But at least know he knows now why Clint makes that weird growling noise (Star Wars, Wookies), what everyone is always looking at on those small handheld devices they're all attached to (they're phones, but also computers, there is a thing called the Internet and it is magnificent), the significance of the words "one small step for mankind" (the moon landing, and boy had that one been a revelation).

There is a level of sarcasm, of self-defense, that people speak with these days that Steve finds both repellent and seductive. He doesn't indulge in it often, his values are too old-school for that. He still relates to the world earnestly. But he enjoys the way conversations between people crackle with subtext and double-meaning. They did before, too, but there's so much more to draw from now. So many more colors.

Perhaps this is the biggest surprise for Steve; how much of it he enjoys. There's a contrarian streak in him that resists admitting it aloud, but the future is... fun. It's terrifying, it's mind-blowing, it's bewildering. But what Natasha doesn't know is that Steve sometimes goes to the quiet, dark bars outside of town, talks to women his own biological age who don't remember him from their history lessons and comic books; sometimes when they invite him to come home with them, he even accepts. It's never anything substantial and maybe that's what his friend is hoping he'll find, but what he's finding instead is that people in this era place value on the insubstantial, the ephemeral. They enjoy it. He finds himself enjoying it too. Sometimes. Baby steps.

It's not like the hits stop coming. He finds out Bucky is still alive, that his best friend has also dropped out of time and history. He loses him again within the same week. He realizes with horror how differently they've spent the past seventy years. He invests his time and his energy into SHIELD, only to watch it literally crash and burn before his very eyes. In fact, he is once again left riding the sinking ship down into the frigid waters. He finds Peggy only to discover, with relief and heartbreak, she continued living her life without him. But there is clarity in these events: he won't give up on Bucky and he won't give up on fighting HYDRA, his tenacity woven into his very DNA and Steve still hasn't quite figured out if that makes him better suited, in the long run, for this century or the last. 

Steve wakes up in a hospital bed to find that he is not dead, that Bucky has pulled him from the wreckage of the sunken Helicarrier. His new friend Sam is playing Marvin Gaye for him. In comparison to his deliverance, the pain he suffers is “just a flesh wound” (Monty Python, thank you Coulson). He throws a quip Sam's way, it's a bit meaningful and a bit absurd, because that's how people are these days. He lets his eyes slip closed again, the smooth strains of “Trouble Man” seep in around the sadness and the pain and brighten up the horizon.


	6. Abstract Expressionism

He's survived a lot of sturm und drang by the time Thor shows up. No, not that Thor. His Thor.

She is glorious. His breath catches at the sight of her from the first moment the Bifröst deposits her on the lawn of the Avengers facility. He's survived the fall of SHIELD, the passing of the Sokovia Accords. He's spent two years of his new life hunting for Bucky and then Rumlow; he's lost Stark's trust and his friendship in a bunker in Siberia. He's regained Bucky. He's hidden out in the jungles of Wakanda with T'Challa and his fellow ex-Avenger fugitives until Stark caved, hired a fancy law firm to dig them all out of the Accords mess.

He remembers Thor boasting of her intelligence, her desirability at a party once. It feels like several lifetimes ago. One late night, alone and wired, he watches her interview with Charlie Rose. When she was still Jane Foster. When she was still Thor's girl. On the program, she speaks quickly, with excitement, about her field. He never would have guessed he'd be able to understand astrophysics but when she lays it out for Charlie, he thinks maybe he almost can. She was so very bright. Even then, she shone.

It's been a very busy few years. When he told Fury all that time ago, in an empty boxing gym in Brooklyn, that he'd spent seventy years sleeping and didn't want to do any more of it, he did not think the world would take him quite so literally at his word.

She is small but there is not an ounce of diffidence or meekness in how she carries herself. Her gleaming armor fits her body as though it was forged onto her, her lips quirk with merriment at the reactions her presence provokes. She holds the war hammer Mjølnir almost lackadaisically, the way a child walking down the street with their teddy bear in hand might swing their arm.

He'd thought that returning to the Avengers fold, that reconciling with Tony and reinstating himself as the Captain would bring sorely needed direction back into his life. After all, much of his adulthood has been spent as this icon of truth and justice. But that was before he died for his country, before he spent a lifetime trapped, undying and aware, in the ice. Before he saw the worst impulses of domination and tyranny bloom like an unstoppable weed inside the very organism the woman he loved so dearly had planted. The path to hell, he thinks.

The Avengers question her worthiness and she offers them the hammer, which they try but cannot lift. Steve manages to drag it just slightly across the lawn and when he looks down into her warm, brown eyes he can see she is amused but not impressed. Something about this reaction drags him deeper in, as though just looking at her delicate features didn't already start his mind wildly galloping in a thousand hopeful, fearful directions.

She takes off her helmet and her hair is golden, it hangs down past her chin. It is unkempt and shaggy but her face is dainty, almost pixie-ish and Steve can't remember why he thought human connection was so outside the realm of possibility. How terrible could connecting with someone so noble, so beautiful, possibly be?

The first day they spar is a rude awakening. Steve knows that Thor is strong, realizes she must be, to be who she is, but when he advances on her as they begin to train he finds himself flat on his back without fully understanding how he's gotten there. He can't help it, he laughs a little bit at the ceiling in awe. She pops into view, concern etched into her face, and at his laugh her eyes lighten, a wild grin breaking out. She offers her hand to him and he takes it gladly, less surprised now than he might have been a minute ago when she pulls him to his feet.

He makes dinner for her sometimes, and they go for drives on his motorcycle, her arms wrapped around him and her cheek resting on his back. They don't talk about what it means and although he wants them to be dates, he's never entirely sure that they are. He can't quite bring himself to ask her; somehow this torturous not-knowing is better than the certainty of her rejection. And she never once pushes him, never asks him for his feelings on anything relating to her besides her battle strategy techniques.

It's quiet, when they're together. They're quiet, thoughtful people. They have both been forged anew in the world they now live in, they share a keen awareness of how different they both are from who they were. They tease each other kindly; she stills know more about pop culture than him, although he is surprised sometimes by the things he has heard of which she has not. She blames her lifelong obsession with her work. It is the calm assurance that surrounds her that he thinks he loves most of all. And yet... there is a yelping, roaring clamor inside him during these moments they share. He wonders if she can hear it but chooses to pretend she can't. He wonders what she thinks about. He wonders if she ever touches herself and thinks of him, like he does more and more frequently of her.

That'll be where it begins and ends, he figures. They must prepare themselves for the battle with Thanos, for the darkness that lies ahead. But she walks into the kitchen one night and eats two heaping bowls of the pad thai he's prepared. She pushes him to admit what he feels for her, and shows him for the first time how much of her is still Jane, still a woman who desires. He thinks that if she smiled at him with that mirthful, teasing look she gets in her eyes, her strange, two-toned voice speaking in her formal inflection, she could ask almost anything in the world of him. He feels safe in entrusting her with this devotion, this adoration. He knows she will never abuse it. She sees him as he is, behind the virtuous front he presents. She knows what it is to be a person divided.

And when her lips touch his, he feels all his emotions swell to encompass the whole kitchen then focus down to a laser-like intensity on her. Here is a direction he can travel. He carries her back to his room, not because she needs him to but because he loves the feel of her strong thighs bracketing his waist and her thin arms slung carelessly over his wide shoulders. Her mouth is on his jaw and he has to take deep, calming breaths to keep this from turning into an act of exhibitionism.

Their first time is like riding a schooner into a squall, he can barely harness his raging ecstasy and he comes far too quickly. She doesn't, so he atones, his mouth on her cunt, and when they end up wrapped around each other again it is slower, almost relaxed. The calm waves that follow the storm. There is still a hard edge of need but it is cut by her own vivacious joy, her insistence that he laugh with her, that this be fun for them. He does. It is.


	7. Maximalism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay this chapter may ask for a little prior knowledge of how Bucky and Darcy met in my other series. TL;DR... Bucky met Darcy after CA:WS and they hooked up, but he split. They met up again in CA:CW but had to part because of Bucky being framed by Zemo/arrested, and then they finally reunited/coupled up for real after Bucky, Steve and the others return from their exile in Wakanda, about a year and change after CA:CW.

In the aftermath of Thanos, there is a a glut of happiness, a need everyone indulges in to be held and to feel comfort. He sees it in the way Bucky hovers around Darcy when she comes to visit Jane[1] at the facility. He has one hand on her at all times, like he is assuring himself she is still there. Still unharmed. The shadows linger under her eyes from the weeks she's spent sidelined, worried for them as they battled against the seemingly invincible god on several planets and various planes of existence. She's thinner, her curves slightly less lush than they were the first time he met her, not long after Bucky had dropped him on the bank of the Potomac. How flush she had been with new love then[2]. Bucky hovers, feeding her as much as she'll allow. She basks in his affection like a sleepy cat on a sunny day.

There is still a silly, happy side to her, despite the gravity of her role as lobbyist for meta-human rights and Professor Charles Xavier's political representative. She allots her maturity and restraint for the time when the lives of others hang in the balance. When he sees her she is mostly flirting, playing, laughing. He takes heart in this.

Natasha flits in and out of their lives, establishing an uneasy alliance with Darcy to work together against the Meta-Human Registration Act which grows, with time, into genuine affinity[3]. The circle is extended to include the close-knit friendship of Darcy and Jane[4], and eventually Pepper, the women meeting regularly to paint the town red and luxuriate in the support of other women who are extraordinary, who live unconventional lives. He sees Natasha and Bruce[5] continue to orbit each other warily, and hopes some day they'll try again. He thinks Natasha seems ever so slightly more settled now than she was before the great battles with Thanos, believes perhaps even she could find contentedness outside of strife and intrigue.

He runs with Jane[6] and Sam in the mornings. Bucky sometimes joins them, on the weekends when he and Darcy stick around the facility. Though they have vanquished perhaps the greatest foe they will likely ever meet, other threats remain. HYDRA, AIM, the Ten Rings, Doctor Doom, the Sovereign. Odinson[7] has not taken Mjølnir back from Jane[8]; when the dust settled from their final campaign against Thanos, successful at last, he proclaimed her worthier than himself and asked her to carry the duty for a while longer. She agreed, because in her heart she has the same moral imperative Steve does to help, if she can. He loves her for this. He knows that if she does return the hammer, she will still be Aesir[9], still be strong. She will still fight, in her own way. She is irrevocably changed by the responsibilities she has been given and her ready acceptance of them makes his own easier to live with.

They all take a week around Christmas to visit Clint's farmhouse, celebrate Laura's news that she is pregnant with their fourth child. Even Fury shows up for a few hours to say hello, offer his congratulations and an absurdly cute Hulk onesie for the forthcoming addition to the Barton clan. Darcy and Natasha keep their phones on but check them only occasionally. They go sledding one morning, Steve holding Jane's[10] tiny waist in his arms, her legs snugly secured between his as they slide down a hill on a flimsy piece of plastic. Clint takes them hunting on another day. Natasha kills four geese foolish enough not to fly south for the winter, and they eat them the next night. Vision remains behind when they go, and Laura teaches him how to bake apple and pumpkin pies. Though they all try to deny it, there is a tension in the house and Wanda is on edge for days because of the fear they are all projecting that the call to assemble will come. But it does not, and Tony arrives on Christmas Day[11] with a helicopter overflowing with gadgets for his friends, toys for the children. It is typical Stark excess, Steve thinks. Nevertheless, he appreciates his new state-of-the-art Starkpad. It comes loaded with several digital art applications, which is how Steve knows Tony has fully forgiven him.

Later, lying curled around Jane[12] on a pull-out couch in the Barton's attic, he rests his lips against her sharp clavicle. Her slim hand strokes through his hair and he thinks how unbelievably lucky they all are to have walked away from Thanos with their lives and limbs.

“You are stewing, my love,” she whispers softly.

“Giving thanks,” he amends. She kisses his forehead and wraps her legs tighter around his. He rubs her back because he knows she likes the feel of his large, warm hands on her when she's falling asleep. The comfort, the safety of this bond he could have never seen coming makes his eyes heavy, his breathing even. He dreams of his boyhood, of Jane[13], of his mother and of Peggy[14].

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. [Thor]   
>  2\. [Their relationship is a thing he admires deeply. It took them years of striving, of forging their way in the world to find each other at the right time. When he sees Bucky's metal arm slung around her waist, his mechanized hand resting gently on her belly as he whispers dirty compliments in her ear because he thinks no one is listening or can hear him, Steve remembers the blithe youth who taught him to box, dragged him on double dates, went off to war with a song in his heart. His relief that this light-heartedness in Bucky is not gone, not completely, is equal to his appreciation for Darcy in bringing it out in his old friend.]   
>  3\. [The weight of her history with Bucky, a man, she confesses to him in a rare moment of honesty, who molded her into the deadly force she still is, keeps Natasha away for a long time. But Darcy's warmth pulls all of them in like moths to a flame, and even Natasha concedes her friendship to the woman eventually.]   
>  4\. [Thor]   
>  5\. [The Hulk having been brought back to Earth from the planet Sakaar after the sorcerer Doctor Strange sent Odinson there to find him, and one of the infinity stones. He played a crucial role in the battles, Steve remembers, his brutal assault weakening Thanos' hold on their reality and allowing them, at last, to tear his control to shreds.]   
>  6\. [Thor]   
>  7\. [The other Thor, not his but the one who was born in Asgard, adopted this name upon losing Mjølnir.]   
>  8\. [Thor]   
>  9\. [Having eaten an Apple of Idunn, provided by Loki, while she was dying of cancer.]   
>  10\. [Thor]   
>  11\. [He had refused the offer to stay the entire week, insisting that it was too many people in too small a space, too many germs. Steve thinks he is also still wary of his friends, even after all they have been through together, because of how the rift caused by the Sokovia Accords. He hopes that Tony will be able to lay that to rest some day. Steve knows that he has.]   
>  12\. [Thor]   
>  13\. [Thor]   
>  14\. [When he dreams, Peggy appears to him how she was in her youth, decisive and pert. Once in a while he dreams of her in her hospice bed, silver hair framing her confused, wrinkled face. The yearning he used to feel in those dreams has abated. What remains is pride. He wakes feeling thankful that she found someone, that she did something valuable and important with her life. He feels proud of her, proud to have known her. There is only the smallest trace of lingering regret in this pride, and Jane is there to kiss it better.]


End file.
